- Financial operating system company OpenFin has raised $17 million led by Wells Fargo
- Barclays, Bain Capital Ventures, JPMorgan, and Pivot Investment Partners also joined this round
- OpenFin hired Tim Dinsdale from Goldman Sachs as its European chief technology officer
OpenFin has become known as the operating system (OS) of finance. Recently, OpenFin announced it raised $17 million in Series C funding from some major banks and fintech investors led by Wells Fargo. Barclays and existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, JPMorgan, and Pivot Investment Partners participated in this round as well. Including this Series C round of funding, OpenFin has raised a total of $40 million.
“Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems and app stores have enabled more than a million apps that have fundamentally changed how we live,” said OpenFin co-founder and CEO Mazy Dar. “OpenFin OS and our new app store services enable the next generation of desktop apps that are transforming how we work in financial services.”
With this round of funding, OpenFin is going to make the OpenFin OS ubiquitous on financial desktops and to further fund product innovation. Another product that will be advanced with the funding is OpenFin’s new Cloud Services offering, which enables banks, asset managers, wealth managers, and hedge funds to provide their own private app stores for employees and customers out of the box.
“OpenFin is building the roads, bridges and communications infrastructure for financial apps that will allow capital markets to innovate like Silicon Valley,” commented Matt Harris — partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “We are proud to have been early backers of the company and we welcome the strategic support from Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo.”
Currently, the global financial services industry is spending billions in addressing the digital transformation of thousands of legacy desktop applications used for client service centers, front office, operations, risk, and compliance.
And OpenFin’s widely adopted desktop operating system enables financial services firms to build new applications with modern web technology while enabling seamless and secure integration with legacy applications. This allows firms to modernize and unify the end-user desktop experience while extracting the greatest possible value from existing technology investments.
“Agility and interoperability are core pillars of our digital strategy because time is a precious resource, especially in a banking environment. OpenFin accelerates our innovation cycle and allows us to create better workflows, enabling our colleagues and clients to make more productive use of their time,” explained Barclays Investment Bank’s Head of Digital and Client Strategy Brett Tejpaul. “We are pleased to support the company which is a leader in the industry with its open source model and its commitment to industry collaboration.”
OpenFin OS has become known as a de facto market standard for deployment and interoperability of desktop apps that power digital transformation across the industry. And its customers include most major banks, leading asset management firms, and many of the best-known vendor platforms in the space. And the operating system software runs over 1,000 applications at more than 1,500 banks and buy-side firms across 200,000 desktops in over 60 countries.
“We have been following OpenFin’s progress and are impressed by the company’s success in gaining wide adoption in capital markets. OpenFin is leading a key effort in providing the financial industry with a modern and unifying foundation for development and secure distribution of financial applications,” added Basil Darwish — the Managing Director of Strategic Investments at Wells Fargo Securities. “We are delighted to lead OpenFin’s Series C funding round and excited to support the next phase of their development.”
Recently, OpenFin announced it hired Tim Dinsdale from Goldman Sachs as its European chief technology officer, according to Markets Media. Dinsdale had worked in a variety of technology roles at Goldman Sachs, a software engineer for Sony Computer, and a video game developer for Kuju prior to joining OpenFin. Dinsdale is going to report to OpenFit president and COO Chuck Doerr.
“In London, we are continuing to build out our desktop services architecture, which right now is heavily focused on our notifications service, and the FDC3 interoperability service. I think that last one is hugely important, and we’re going to keep working on ways to help apps in the OpenFin ecosystem communicate with each other,” said Dinsdale via Markets Media.
OpenFin launched the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium (FDC3) a couple of years ago with several other major industry players in order to enable universal connectivity and standards across desktop apps. And last year, OpenFin contributed the FCD3 initiative to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) — which is a nonprofit organization that promotes open source technologies in financial services.
